12/4/2023 0 Comments Ingredients in a gibson drinkWhat I said was, ‘Give me all the cocktail onions you have.’ Half the time, bars don’t even have them and then I’m forced to yell a stream of obscenities while overturning tables (joking that’s when I order a whiskey soda). I’m worried what you just heard was give me a lot of cocktail onions. Just give me all the cocktail onions you have. If you didn’t already know, vermouth-soaked cocktail onions are God’s greatest gift to drinks and I am to cocktail onions what Ron Swanson is to protein. In fact, I probably (no, I know) I annoy bartenders when I’m like, “I’ll have a Gibson, but on the rocks, half gin, half vermouth, lots of orange bitters, and all the cocktail onions.” My friend Beau Williams of Julep Cocktail Club introduced me to this method for making a gin martini, and I haven’t looked back since. While I call this “my” all-time favorite martini recipe, it’s not really my recipe. To really throw you off, it calls for equal parts gin and vermouth, and I usually end up eating about nine to 13 onions per drink consumed. And because I give zero fucks about rules, it also gets a few aggressive dashes of orange bitters. I do love coupes, but stemmed martini glasses are the Devil’s spawn and I really like drinks that go “clink!” So, I take this Gibson martini on the rocks - rather, one big rock. It’s also usually served in a coupe or cocktail glass. In fact, the only thing that really differentiates a Gibson from the original is that it’s garnished with a cocktail onion instead of a lemon twist. Traditionally, a Gibson is made with gin and dry vermouth, and is stirred, not shaken. But when I want a damn good drink that’s not whiskey, I always turn to a Gibson martini on the rocks. While I may still “play,” I was excited to finally bust it out this week for my all-time favorite martini. It’s something I used to make with regularity, but everything in the fall and winter was so fucking festive, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to make a damn good drink just for the sake of making a damn good drink. Sometime last fall, Tom’s Town, a new-ish Kansas City distillery with an old soul, gave me a bottle of their McElroy’s Corruption Gin to play around with. Our suggestion is to buy a jar of cocktails onions, rinse them off and rebrine them with equal parts water and vinegar, along with plenty of pickling spices like bay leaf and coriander.I’m one of those assholes who responds to an email seven months later with, “SO sorry for the late reply!” And this post is my blog version of that email. Just remember that in a drink this simple, every ingredient really counts. That makes this an excellent time to rediscover this classic. The drink, though, remains an under the radar hit, as most Martini drinkers who prefer a savory drink simply opt for a Dirty Martini made with olive brine. Gibson used to order his Martinis with onions because he believed they helped prevent the common cold. There, a wealthy industrialist named Walter D.K. The most prevalent tale we’ve come across places the birth of the Gibson at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco in the late 1800s. Most booze historians can’t even agree upon the century or city in which it was hatched, let alone who it is named for. Carrie Allan put it, the allium in the onion adds “a salty-sour note that transforms the Martini into a cold, delicate onion soup, at once both aperitif and appetizer.” There are few cocktails of note with a larger number of plausible inception stories than the Gibson. The difference might seem trifling at first glance, but a sip reveals the Gibson’s flavor profile is markedly different from its famous forebear. Then it’s a Gibson, one of the rare times in the cocktail kingdom where the garnish calls the shots. When is a Martini not a Martini? When it’s garnished with an onion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |